We were delighted to welcome Yoshi Kohno of the University of Washington to discuss his work on the privacy and security vulnerabilities of household robots. Not only is it relatively easy to tap into the cameras and microphones of some commercially available robots, but the attacker could move the robot to what he wants to see and use multiple robots to coordinate an attack. Dr. Kohno and his colleagues, including PhD candidate Tamara Denning, recommend encryption and other design improvements as well as education. Event details here. You can download the paper here (requires sign up). This event was co-sponsored by our friends at SLATA and the Center for Law & the Biosciences and also covered the privacy and security of embedded medical devices.

On April 14, 2010, the Law, Science, and Technology program partnered with Adept Technology, Willow Garage, Bosch, and Neato Robotics to show off Stanford University and other Bay Area robots for National Robotics Week. We had over 20+ robots on displays and over a thousand people in attendance. For a full list of displays, see the event page.

You can see pictures of the event here (CNET) and here (Willow Garage).